Lumpsucker is slow to start, left me with mixed feelings on the final act, and strays farther to the telling side of the showing-telling balance than my tastes run (especially with the switching to reported speech during critical conversations).

Ok, now that's out of the way, holy shit, you guys. What a gem.

The world is zany and packed with irony but in that darkly comedic way you try not to laugh when you learn the creator of the Segway died from Segway-and-cliff-related injuries. It's stressful to read such a believable, close dystopia. People, companies, and market forces feel like the same old bullshit from real life, carried to their natural conclusions of the extinction industry premise. Everyone is fucking everyone over (including themselves) all the time, in such intricate, systematic ways that satisfying justice is a fairytale. And yet - relief of reliefs - while it is a clear critique of capitalism, it never feels smug or lecture-like. Rather: yikes, look at what we're doing.

The characters take getting used to yet I was shocked how attached I was by the end. Especially to Halyard, the dick. The author demonstrates surgical precision in letting them be as unappealing as they need to be to display the extinction industry and the a bleak moral conclusion respectively while still injecting enough redeeming aspects to make you root for them. This cure takes different forms too; Halyard gets humanised through his love of food and his sister while Resaint ingratiates herself with the reader via her general competency and being the only person in the room willing to reckon with our ecological devastation.

The humour actually works? It's rare a book makes me laugh out loud but it felt like every chapter had a giggle. 

Even scenery descriptions come furnished with apt but out-there comparisons that make you smile, only occasionally coming across a little self-satisfied. It goes beyond wit and one-liners too; the absurdist humour is not only woven into many plot points (e.g. Resaint's reason for interest in the lumpsuckers), but a load-bearing pillar of the grin-and-bear-it doom that pervades every page.
 
The themes would be nigh untenable without such excellent world, characters, and humour to ease the despair. If you've ever felt the tug of a "Black Hole" moral quandary, this exploration of a rational mind "not being able to get over a particular fact" will grip on an existential level. There is respite, if not absolution, in the multiple valid criticisms Halyard throws up against Resaint's reasoning, though some get lost in the plot. Still plenty of fodder to jumpstart debates with friends.

PS - If anyone figured out where Halyard is meant to be from, let me know! My theories of English and America were shattered as the fates of those nations became clear.